Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Or he's investing in technologies and developments that he has openly and expressly said he believes offers the best economic potential due to what he has learned from those studies.

Hint: If those technologies and developments were not heavily subsidized then Al's investment in those companies would not be worth diddly as they are not economically viable when compared to other non-subsidized alternatives. That is the very reason those industries are subsidized.

To put it another way, I could make a killing if I sold i386 machines for $2000 and the government gave people a $2500 tax credit to buy my stuff. Take away the $2500 tax credit and there is -0- value of owning a company making i386 computers. Al Gore owns many i386 companies who simply cannot compete with other alternatives without massive subsidies.

Even the crown jewel of the greenies, Tesla, wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for massive subsidies.

You haven't answered the issue: how and who differentiates between dissent and trolling?

To be clear, I 100% understand why Twitter is contemplating this action and I understand the issue annoys lots of people. But so do the Westboro Babtist people. Would they and their ilk be considered trolls or dissenters?

The fatal flaw is obvious: How do you define trolling so it is differentiated from dissent? Answer: you can't in any meaningful way.

This is hard censorship, not the kind of soft self censorship that gets "encouraged". This is actual stifling of voices because someone disagrees with what is being said.

Twitter can do whatever they want because they are a private company. However, we the people can also do whatever we want and find another service. If they start censoring, people will leave for someplace that doesn't. It has happened before and will happen again until we learn that freedom of speech means exactly what it says and there are very few exceptions (threats, fire in theatre, etc, etc). The rest of the speech....even the part that makes us gag.....is allowed

Duh. Regulation gives power to politicians and takes decision-making out of the hands of the citizenry. It should come as no suprise that politicians will use that power to further their own goals and not necessarily those of the public.

For a good example of how this could clusterfuck, consider this: what happens if the FCC sees CONTENT they don't like? Do you think they will stand back with hands off screaming "Freedom!"? No, they will find a reason to intervene and thus, the slippery slope will begin. Of course, that is unthinkable(!) now but give it a few years of regulation and I suspect we'll see that kind of action and more that we haven't even thought of.

Layoffs? In government? Are you kidding or are you high? The government never gets smaller. It is always getting larger and looking for "things to do". Of course they are overfunded and overstaffed. That is why they consistently seek more authority and say in people's lives.

I am surprised people are surprised because this is what governments do. Once whatever problem they have been working on has been solved or greatly diminished, they absolutely must find another reason for existing. This is why they continually seek more and more authority over everyone's life.

How about finding some modern examples that have some relevance instead of going back 200+ years to find your "evidence"? Islam is currently trying to destroy civilizations. Not 100 years ago. Not just in one country. They are doing it across the world and across many different cultures.

That you see them as equivalents is laughable to all but the most gullible.

So in all of this time researching solar panels, are you telling me nobody checked into the glass or the pattern of glass on top of the panels themselves? And they also did not look into the various wavelengths of light that penetrate through the glass to know what works better and what works worse?

Pardon me, but is this a joke? This seems like such an obvious area of research related to the industry of gathering solar power that I almost can't believe it wasn't studied before now. What am I missing here?

So let me get this straight.....your cloud is down and your only recourse is to depend on the cloud provider's highly skilled technicians to diagnose and fix the problem? Sign me up! There's nothing I like more than only one path forward which is completely dependent on specialists./s

Are you kidding or do you not understand how large companies, in particular cloud companies, operate? Have you ever had to call one about an unknown issue? Try it sometime....you'll learn a lot.

If the service you chose, for instance, starts to go south on a regular basis, and you've built your entire ecosystem inside a specific vendor's cloud, you could be in a world of hurt.

This right here is why I don't use cloud services and do everything I can to make them unattractive to the users. The more "investment" made into a given cloud system, the more "pain" received when the cloud goes down. As things currently stand, that means I don't trust the cloud for anything other than basic commodity services that can be easily replicated by a number of cloud providers.

My experience also tells me that I am a small fish and I possess very little leverage when I deal with the cloud providers. When things go south, I am not big enough to get anyone to care so I am forced to "take what they give me". Worse, my only recourse is to take my business elsewhere, which is why my comment above is so important.

All in all, it's just not a good deal for anyone that values control. If I were a shop with little to no IT skills, I could overlook the loss of control as the payoff for not requiring an IT dept is hard to pass up. However, just as soon as you sign up and do that -- now what? Who is going to "drive" your IT dept and make your IT better tomorrow than it is today? The cloud provider? Ha!

Great analysis! Comparing market caps are a really good way to compare companies from different industries. However, I want to caution you that this approach does have some limits.

I replied only to drop this little nugget: back in 1996/1997, they said they EXACT same thing about Amazon.com back when Amazon was valued more than all the other retail book sellers combined. At the time, Amazon's valuation seemed crazy but looking back, it turned out to be correct because Amazon wound up being much more than books and that was what most of the analyses up to that point were missing. Of course, its all obvious now when we look in the rear view mirror but it was completely counter intuitive at the time. Nobody knew what Amazon was trying to become because a company like Amazon has never existed before.

I don't know the specifics of Uber but there is some chance that they may really be worth $30bil. Time will tell but the possibility shouldn't be written off so hastily (yet).